A few weeks ago, Steve Sailer teased readers about an article he was writing that dealt with the one demographic factor in the Red State/Blue State divide no one was talking or writing about.
If you don’t know Sailer, you should read some of his work. He writes about politically incorrect topics like race, intelligence and genetics…and fertility rates among white women.
I was actually trying to guess what that factor was, but I had no clue he was referring to something called the “white baby gap.” His article was recently published in The American Conservative. Sailer writes:
[V]oters are picking their parties based on differing approaches to the most fundamentally important human activity: having babies. The white people in Republican-voting regions consistently have more children than the white people in Democratic-voting regions. The more kids whites have, the more pro-Bush they get.I’ll focus primarily on Caucasians, who overall voted for Bush 58-41, in part because they are doing most of the arguing over the meaning of the red-blue division. The reasons blacks vote Democratic are obvious, and other racial blocs are smaller. Whites remain the 800-pound gorilla of ethnic electoral groups, accounting for over three out of every four votes.
That white people in pro-Bush states have more babies on average isn’t new information, is it? While most of us intuit this, we don’t talk about it. It’s almost as taboo as illegitimacy.
Perhaps even more intuitive than the correlation between white birth rates and political leanings are the reasons. People with children seek out less dense and cheaper areas to live in. Red states are less populous than blue states.
To understand what’s driving this huge political phenomenon, you have to think like a real-estate shopper, not like an intellectual. Everybody loves to talk real estate, but the sharp insights into how the world works that you hear while shooting the breeze about houses and neighborhoods seldom work their way into prestigious discourse about public affairs.As you’ve seen on all those red-blue maps, most of America’s land is red, even though Kerry won 48 percent of the vote. Even excluding vast Alaska, Bush’s counties are only one-fourth as densely populated on average as Kerry’s counties. Lower density helps explain why red regions both attract the baby-oriented and encourage larger families among those already there.
Further in the article he lays out what most of us think rather than express. Young singles maximize their options for a mate by moving to areas with other young singles doing the same. When they marry, they tend to move to less “happening” places, and when they have children, they seek even lesser happening places.
Unless you’re wealthy and can afford to live in gated communities or highly secured buildings and send your kids to private schools, I wouldn’t recommend raising a family in New York City, Washington, D.C., or any urban area. Do I really need to explain why? Just think of those other factors we don’t talk about.
I highly recommend the article and Sailer’s web site. Listed on the front page are responses to his “white baby gap” article. As I warned, he writes about controversial stuff. While I may not like some of what he was to say, I agree with his sentiment:
“I believe the truth is better for us than ignorance, lies, or wishful thinking. At least, it’s certainly more interesting.”
Addendum: Also see Sailer’s article on the marriage gap. (Hat tip: Polipundit)
